For a moment the feeling glows
---by Juan Laxagueborde
For a moment the feeling glows
We are seeing a map that it's inside a box. As if that was not enough, it could also be an attic or a basement. Here, the scene is completed by the citizen. With Fernando Rubio, the participant is always brought into play, he stops being a spectator, he evolves into a channel, a grounding wire that makes feelings take shape and materialize. Through his work we adjust to the game using our bodies. Facing his simple and strange mise-en-scenes, that are inventions, is playing. But playing is not the same that just having fun, the game is drawn by innocence and naivety. The player in Fernando's games is not a gambler, is someone who lets himself go. What veil disappears when we let ourselves go? The cold veils, the interventions of technology, the encryption, what must be said, what must be seen, everything prepared by that we do not have control over. We are left with something more immediate. We are left with something open.
Every story that Fernando tells us, the creative obstacles he sets in front of us, have an introspective role; they distort the citizen who stops being so. It's just that the city is set to turn us into automatons. The city is the place of business, business is the place of production and production is the place of machines. His whole Work goes against progress and leaves behind a trail of something that is unsaid but can be felt: the heart is not a machine. To put the city as a map, to name it Infinite Cartography, taking it to that almost minimalist place, means the city is also a charm and can be seen in perspective. Not the city of an ivory tower, but that one where we are out of ourselves to be represented in that cold map. Perspective is a mixture of seeing the city in a schematic way and practising the emotional memory, the present or the most pure arbitrariness of choice to place the picture in any spot. To look for a place to set the picture is, in a way, to look inside ourselves, in the places where we've been, but also in the place where we are. It's a reflection on how time is inhabited. What's cold is the map but we are what's warm when we realize that behind that plotter there is a territoriality, a memory and an effort that takes us our whole lives, that we usually don't accomplish and that justifies us: to escape from discomfort.
A city is never the same and is always in the same place, it gets covered by soot, by people, by noise, by cubic meters of trash, but at the bottom there is the same base of every city: the stealthy movement of unscrupulous entrepreneurs or their gait through the streets of cars, buses and motorcycles that reveal a sentence between the technological arrogance and the space they take. Because sentence means destiny and destiny means irreversibility. Could a city be less hostile to the inhabitant? Are we willing to reduce the foam of our consumerist habits to defy the tradition of the city as a big amusement fair? The contemporary city has a gloomy scene: children trying to catch their parents' attention to show them some skill that surprises them, and their own parents ignoring the call, magnetized to their cell phones, lost in the cesspit of that tiny screen, sliding their finger through the boring flatland, abandoned to a mirage.
Painter Nahuel Vecino once said that no artist should spend much time without leaving his studio and going to a cafe to read the newspaper. Some of the suffocation provoqued by private life is translated into that scene. The limits of resisting to not granting the city with the ability of new transmissions. In the interview, Vecino went into a cafe and sat by the window leafing a little bit through the paper and scanning the street an other bit, selecting something of that day, turning imagination into something porous. Imagination is not at its best if it's not porous. Something similar to what César Aira does, who prizes the dialectics between cafes, writing, street and invention. Many of Aira's ideas have the everyday basis of Buenos Aires, but nothing starts and nothing ends on reality, that at the end, in his literature, is what's most pathetic and less real. Vecino and Aira don't do the same but they do share something of the straining of arranged spaces, they are surrealists because they come and go from reality to the organized delirium of the most intense art.
Cartography is a science, but an infinite cartography is the point where feeling wins over calculation, where experience is more than reasoning. The map has no other information than the sketches of the blocks and the names of the streets, the rest is evocation, imagination. While fighting globalization, Infinite Cartography invites to a territoriality of the universal manifestations. It retorts globalization with a cosmopolitan vibe, that attitude that since Borges turns the cities into the excuse from where to project all time all the times.
The city has its charms safely kept or shown outdoors, at some point during a walk, in a corner that contrasts normality... There are spaces, moments, bars, schedules, people that justify it and uphold it. Even if when we go out to the street we get used to the noise and we try to maintain some kind of austerity against the oppressive temptation of shopping malls, we raise our eyes. We move around trying to understand the rhythm, with no time for getting lost between memorable blocks of history, because we are always learning things about the city. We always go back to our first love. Contemplating things is already somehow not a very normal gesture, it is anachronistic, hard to get, I would say even a luxury. We get excited: everything we do and feel is arbitrary, nothing is natural, everything could be different. The problem is that the city could be the exception to the rule. Someone who visited Infinite Cartography in Buenos Aires wrote: Even though I was born here, and I come back, I don't feel part.
We should say that in a map there are also false expectations, there are differences between memory and materiality, but that's what this is about, the illusion of memories, of everyday distortion as a timeless conversation with our own past. Why do some inhabitants of this odd device set pictures outside the map? What's an important moment? What is a moment? What happens with those who don't follow the instructions? Those questions argue with the passivity of any concept. Maps are concepts and we people are life after all. In this friction, Fernando's art leaves in vibrato the string through which everything is created.
We are pleased and on the verge of everything. The first and last thing we ought to do is staring at a map in the middle of nothing, as floating. In the middle of this, we can find what we were, what we are and what we will be.
Juan Laxagueborde